I didn’t sleep last night.

— and no, it wasn’t because I was staying up all night trying to concoct the perfect “Senior Citizen day” outfit. It was because I was thinking. A lot.

It all started with a homework assignment. I was responding to the first four chapters of “Le Petit Prince” (more commonly known to those outside of AP French as “The Little Prince”), when I started mulling over some of the bigger picture ideas that the children’s book held.

For the first time in recent memory, I took the initiative to read ahead in an assigned book because I so utterly enjoyed the story. In a matter-of-fact fashion, the book taught me many lessons about growing up and humanity in general.

Grasping the message of this book at the end of high school is the emotional equivalent of viewing the final scene in Toy Story 3 as an impending college student; when Saint-Exupery writes in conclusion that “no grown-ups could ever understand how such a thing could be so important,” I had the same feeling as when I witnessed Andy handing down his cherished toys to the little girl at the end of the film.

But it didn’t stop there. My mind kept churning as I stemmed off from the inevitability of growing up into a more overarching theme of dreaming and dreamers.

Dreams are what you’re destined to understand before you see it happen. We are curious and driven to explore by life’s ever-astonishing self similar properties.

Unfortunately we can’t hold onto them. As Joseph Conrad once wrote in his novel, Heart of Darkness, “No relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams.”

As much as we’d like to, you can’t bottle a dying star in its last cosmic throes — or more simply put, an experience. This led me to wonder if dreams could even exist in reality, or if they turn to stone the second they leave our minds.

As a result, we are all constantly in a state of trying to recreate it all. Scientists in a lab, trying to find the cure; the antidote to stay in the inspired moment just a second longer — two drops of glorious existence and a spritz of epiphany, stirred three times counterclockwise under 3.4 kPa — and so on.

I think sustained happiness for dreamers would come a lot easier if no one had any concept of time. In the dawn of mankind there was no notion of duty or obligation to the simple harmonic motion of time ticking away — life slipping through our fingers. To each his own and they were all limitless in a sense. I want that. But I digress.

I don’t even know what last night accomplished, I hold a vague idea that no one left the wiser, but after all that time and thought I’ve got a premonition that something had to have gotten done. If not in the present, then in anticipation of the future — preparation for a day not yet arrived.

I think for the time being though, I provided myself with the last bit of purpose, motive, and drive to make it through the end of the school year. So, I’ll leave you with the mantra I created for myself awhile back this semester when the going got tough—

Take a position. One of irregard for outside opinion. One that sets you on a path. Then press forward. Scrap all preconceived notions. Make adjustments. Fill in gaps. See everything for what it is: feel.

—Believe you me, the tough will get going.

Thanks for bearing with me this year, and through this blog in particular (I’ve never been one to pass up a grand gesture) and if you’d like to contact me you may at [email protected] or you can tweet @thehippestcat.